Amazon: A Patch for Your Novel Is Ready To Download

As e-books go mainstream, authors are gaining an opportunity to literally rewrite history.

Associated Press

The Kindle 2

Eagle-eyed owners of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, like Paul Biba of the site TeleRead, have taken note of messages from Amazon letting them know that an e-book they had purchased “contained some errors that have been corrected.” The notes come with an offer from Amazon to wirelessly download an updated version of the book–with the owners’ permission.

An Amazon spokesman confirms that the company does, from time to time, contact customers with updates, and they occur with both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Back when books had to be printed on dead trees, authors couldn’t do anything to fix an error they found after a book had been published. Once the book was in readers’ hands and on library shelves, the matter was moot.

But now that books, like computers, are connected to the Internet, they’re much more dynamic. Theoretically, the ability to change a book could be used both for good and bad purposes.

F. Paul Wilson, the author of the novel for which Biba was offered an update, says the capability is “a thing of beauty.”

In the case of his book “An Enemy of the State,” an error occurred in the process of converting his book to Kindle format–the process inadvertently dropped the last three chapers before the epilogue. Readers complained to Amazon, and so it contacted Wilson to fix the Kindle version of his book.

“I’ve had goofs in my hardcovers in the past, but we were never able to fix them until the next printing or edition, and no way to get the changes to people who had already bought the book,” says Wilson. This gaffe was fixed in a matter of days, he says.

That capability is particularly useful in cases where there’s a production error–or perhaps with textbooks that can be updated with new data as it becomes available.

Wilson added that he frequently modifies his work. When a new publisher was re-issuing his book “The Tomb,” he tweaked it to trim the prose and remove anachronisms like Johnny Carson.

“But that’s me,” said Wilson. “I don’t think a book is ever perfect. E-books offer the ability to tinker forever, which is not a good thing for me,” he said.